Law360 (March 3, 2025, 5:55 PM EST) — Five federal agencies are violating their legal obligations to provide transparency about their connection to the Elon Musk-headed entity that’s leading the Trump administration’s effort to reduce government staffing and spending levels, environmentalists said in a D.C. federal lawsuit filed Monday.
The Center for Biological Diversity said that the U.S. departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Transportation and Commerce as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are not complying with the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s requirements regarding teams they’ve assembled to report to the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
President Donald Trump on his first day in office renamed the U.S. Digital Service to be the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, which the billionaire Musk has led in efforts to gather information about governmental agency staff and spending. Agency leaders have responded to information gathered by and instructions from DOGE by freezing grants, firing workers and taking other steps to cut back their activities.
Trump also ordered each federal agency head to create a “DOGE team” that coordinates with the main office. And that’s where the agencies have violated FACA, the center said in its complaint.
The DOGE teams are actually advisory committees as defined by FACA, so they’re required to file a charter with the head of the agency to whom the committee reports setting forth, among other information, the committee’s objectives and the scope of its activity, and a description of the duties for which the committee is responsible and the authority for those duties, the center said.
But none of the agencies have done any of that, it said.
FACA also requires “the membership of the advisory committee … to be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee,” which has also been ignored, the center said in its complaint.
“That is especially critical here given Mr. Musk’s control over DOGE’s efforts to reform our government and his influence over the DOGE teams that will be implementing the ‘DOGE agenda’ from within the agencies, which includes across-the-board regulatory recissions, administrative reductions of the federal work-force, and massive spending reductions to the federal budget,” it said.
The complaint said that Musk and other billionaires and tech executives stand to benefit personally and financially from the DOGE teams’ work, including by securing government contracts, eliminating environmental rules that apply to their companies, and reducing the government’s regulatory capacity and authority, including by targeting specific agencies, statutes and spending decisions that affect their businesses.
“Elon Musk and his hacker minions are tearing apart the federal agencies that protect our public lands, keep our air and water clean, and conserve our most cherished wildlife. The public has every right to know why they’re waging this cruel war on our environment,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Monday. “Musk has shown that he can and will destroy a federal agency in a single weekend. If his deranged antics are allowed to continue, we might never be able to fix the damage to America’s environment.”
The Interior Department and EPA declined to comment Monday. The other agencies and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The Center for Biological Diversity is represented in-house by Lauren A. Parker and Jared Margolis.
Counsel information for the agencies was not available Monday.
The case is Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Department of the Interior et al., case number 1:25-cv-00612, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.